Charles Sturt University's Mobile Learning Project

Monthly Archives: September 2011

The steering committee for the project met this morning for the first time! It’s a significant milestone that marks the starting point of the project. Amongst the usual business we were able to quickly settle on a name for the project to help define differentiate the project – so we are the mLearn Project! This blog will be updated regularly to track our progress and let everyone know what’s going on – so check back regularly!

User Experience (UX) is the foundation of developing any user facing system, application, website – it is designing for the User. It’s vital to have a good understanding of UX before embarking on development work. Nick Finck’s presentation The Ten Commandments of User Experience is a great starting point. I love the 10 commandments he’s put together:

The User is always right – You are not the user and neither is your boss!

When you put it like that it was easy! But what does it mean? Well, there is no single mobile context. Mobile devices range from phones and tablets through to eReaders (yes, someone can actually view your work in 256 shades of grey! Take that marketing!). Mobile connections come in a range of forms, from broadband and WiFi through the spectrum of 4G, 3G, 2G, CDMA and even no connection at all. It’s about sensors and device capabilities. It’s about browsers and supported standards. Libraries and gestures. Touch and type.

Mobile context is whatever the user has access to in any given situation.

Designing for mobile requires you to study your users. Watching what, how, where and when they do things. Learning from them and adapting and modifying your design, your product and your systems. You need to learn their tools and their processes.

Assuming information about your users can lead you to make common mistakes. Here’s some things to consider about mobile:

The majority of use happens at home – especially during other activities like TV.

The number one manufacturer of cameras in the world in 2010 was Nokia.

As part of this project I really want to build on existing knowledge, experience and projects. While what we are attempting is new at CSU and in a lot of higher education providers, we’re not the only pioneers forging into new territory. Part of the learning process is picking up information that helps to guide and inform our work, decisions and practices. There’s a wealth of knowledge out there already, so let’s gather it, learn from it and use it. In essence we can create a guide for others that come after us, who can learn from us. So I’m creating a Guides category to the blog which will be something that we create and assemble over time. You can access these guides from the main navigation or from the categories menu. We’ll update these as we go along.

Feel free to comment on these and expand our learning network and shared experiences!